Webspinna Battle

Artist Statement (for Jared Richardson and Billy Knowles):

Doing a “webspinna battle” was one of the most different things we’ve ever been assigned to do. The concept of using audio to illustrate a fight between two opponents was a foreign concept at first, but over time we grew to love it and let it guide our brainstorming process. Perhaps the hardest part was deciding what characters we would be. After much conversation and debate, we settled on two types of people we viewed as polar opposites: Mountain Men and Business Men.

We had our characters, but now we needed a good story/conflict to put them in. Billy came up with the great idea of having the mountain man enjoying the serenity of nature, only to be interrupted by the business man’s industrial agenda. This became our framing device for our performance, and it really influenced what clips we selected for it. The beginning segments, for example, were more introductory, with Jared looping movie quotes that use the word “business,” while Billy cranked up the Paul Bunyon and Monty Python lumberjack songs. Later on, though, we became more hostile, such as when Jared played the videos of someone explaining why “camping sucks” and brandishing wads of dollar bills. The ending was a little chaotic, but overall we were pleased with our illustration of our two opposing forces.

This assignment was a great exercise in sampling—using a wide range of unique sources to create a new type of performance. When you pause to think about it, though, sampling is something we do on a regular basis in more subtle ways. As Lethem suggests, we all draw on art that we’re familiar with when we try to make something original, effectively remixing or reorganizing it into something new. This can be subtle, such as when you incorporate the “Hero’s Journey” into a story you write, based on works you’ve experienced (such as Star Wars). In the case of the webspinna battle, this principle was much more literal, as we were taking direct clips and sounds and mashing them together to create new contexts. In this way, we created something different than the sum of our parts, and we consider it to be just as “original” as any other creation.